3 Questions To Ask Before Developing a Chatbot

3 Questions To Ask Before Developing a Chatbot

1. Does someone actually need it?

Validation! The most important word that inexperienced entrepreneurs don’t know. How many times you heard about amazing products that are not used by people? These products are amazing because the are sophisticated, well built, and very tech-oriented. Unfortunately, in order to succeed in business you have to make sure that many people need it and are willing to pay for it. That must be done long before a single code line has been typed.

How do you validate?There are a lot of ways to validate your idea. Some are very simple and some are very complicated. It varies between sending a google form to your potential customers (You can make it way cooler by using Chatbot form tool). This is probably the simplest way to faking the outcome of your service/product manually (if possible) with a landing page and manual back office work.

2. Competition is awesome, sometimes.

A lot of entrepreneurs don’t make the effort to analyze the competition. Some of you are afraid to find someone that makes something very similar to your product. Therefore, when you identify your competitor, you overlook some direct or indirect competition. Here is a tip: Don’t ask “who does the same thing I do?” Instead, ask “who can provide my customer the same profit/value instead of me?”

Having competition may be a great thing. That can mean you are heading towards a good market, with a lot of money in it. If you have competitors that were not founded long time ago and doing well, you can learn from them and find out what works in your market.

Some Tools To Use

Similarweb will help you see what your competitors are doing in order to get their traffic. You can see what they use for Adwords, which sites refer their site, and get offers for similar sites to add to the competition.

Get valuable information about the tools your competitors are using, some of them will be your key to beat them. You will be able to see what platform they use for marketing, coding and many other purposes.

Owler provides information about companies, your competitors for instance, and helps you understand how big are they? how many employees they have? What is their revenue? And how funded are they?

3. Is a chatbot the right way to solve it?

If you read this article, you’re probably a big fan of chatbots. Take a second and think: is a chatbot the best way to help my customer solve the problem? I encounter lots of entrepreneurs that are trying to ride the wave of a buzz word. Don’t get me wrong. I am the first to say that Chatbots are the future and we should all focus on making them, but you have to make sure that you are doing it for the right reasons. Startups and business operations can’t keep going for the thrill of joining a buzz, you must make sure that your value proposition is best served with chat interface. By doing these things, you will be confident that your future customers/users will love what you are doing.